Pink Floyd, Echoes, Live at Pompeii

Posted in Pink Floyd, Youtube Favs on November 21st, 2011 by Willie

Pink Floyd has some lengthy songs.  I think most of the time, it sounds like they rode in on a long traveling cosmic wave from Neptune.  They made sure to reflect the journey accurately with long gentle harmonized verses and guitar solos that surge and bend like celestial orbits.  “Echoes,” from the 1970 album Meddle, was credited to all four members of the group, and is a gorgeous galactic ballad about some undersea magic, or something.  Originally, the song was about two planetary bodies meeting, but Roger Waters was concerned that the band would be pegged as a “space-rock” band, so he made sure to change the imagery to the more aquatic themed variety.  Sorry Roger, the song still sounds like space-rock, and that’s how your band will forever be remembered, nice try though.  Anyway, these clips of “Echoes” are culled from the 1972 film, “Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii,” probably one of the pompous cinematic events that greatly inspired the boys in Spinal Tap.  I mean, the drummer Nick Mason looks exactly like Harry Shearer’s character Derek Smalls, no coincidence in my opinion.  Want more “Echoes” fun facts?  Ok, I got two.  The first is the Waters’s claim that Andrew Lloyd Webber plagiarized the riff of the song for his “Phantom of the Opera” musical.  In a great quote Waters said, “I couldn’t believe it when I heard it.  It’s the same time signature, it’s 12/8, and it’s the same structure and it’s the same notes and it’s the same everything.  Bastard.  It probably is actionable.  It really is!  But I think that life’s too long to bother with suing Andrew fucking Lloyd Webber.”  Fun fact #2 is that one of my favorite bands Ween used a 5 second clip of “Echoes” for their song “Birthday Boy.”  This was no plagiarism, it was a DIRECT LIFT!  I have no idea how Ween got away with putting a Pink Floyd recording on their major label debut record, but sometimes miracles happen.  Anyway, take a 15 minute break and enjoy “Echoes” parts 1 and 2 live in Pompeii, Italy.

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